Category Archives: Tennessee politics

Homeschooling, Tennessee politics

Tennessee Department of Education has declared homeschooler’s diplomas to be “worthless”

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The Department of Education has so far succeeded in declaring all homeschoolers’ high school diplomas to be invalid.

Bill Hobbs has a nice summary of what the Department has done:

Cindy Benefield, the Tennesseee Department of Education Executive Director of Field Services, who oversees the state’s homeschooling office, recently declared that a diploma from a church-related school is “not worth the paper it is written on.” That is not just the idle opinion of one uninformed bureaucrat, but has become Department policy. Bredesen’s education commissioner, Tim Webb, told four legislators in April that until the legislature passes a law stating that the diplomas given by church-related schools are acceptable, they aren’t acceptable for certain kinds of employment.

And the state is now preventing people who hold diplomas from church-related schools or home schools from holding certain jobs. For example: a police officer in Roane County, who holds a diploma from a church-related school, then graduated the police academy with perfect grades, has been demoted and prohibited from continuing to serve as a police officer – even though he also graduated from the local community college. The Rockwood police officer has been forced to take a desk job until he takes and passes the GED because the Department of Education says his 2001 diploma from a church-related school is invalid.

The fallout goes beyond that one officer. Suspects he has arrested may be set free because he can not appear as a witness in the case because the state, which regulates the profession, says his diploma is invalid.

Church-related schools (CRS) have been issuing high school diplomas since at least 1975 – and until now, they’ve always been accepted, never been challenged. The bigger irony in this is that the Tennessee university system and the Lottery scholarships continue to accept CRS diplomas. It’s a fair assumption to predict that the Department of Education would like that practice to stop as well.

Rep. Mike Bell’s bill to reverse this stunning policy change escaped the House Ed Committee without being hijacked, but it is now sitting in the Calendar & Rules Committee where it may be quietly allowed to die. If that happens, the Department will have succeeded in disenfranchising thousands of high school graduates by bureaucratic fiat. There are upwards of 40,000 homeschool students in TN. Probably 3,000 of them graduate from high school each year. The Department’s actions not only invalidate the diplomas of this year’s graduating class, they retroactively invalidate the diplomas of thousands who have graduated over the past thirty years.

What’s happening is an outrage. We have a shortage of good police officers. We have a shortage of good daycare workers – but the Department of Education can’t stand it that someone out there might be getting an education outside their control.

– Rob Shearer
Director, Schaeffer Study Center

Homeschooling, Tennessee politics

TN House Education Committee passes bill to require state agencies to accept Church-Related School’s high school diplomas as valid

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Longest blog post title ever…

The bill was HB 1652, and you can read the history of how we got here in an earlier post.

The terminology of legislative committees is QUITE confusing… apologies to all. Enacting legislation is messy… today was a little messier than most.

When the problem with the police officer and daycare worker surfaced, the deadline for introducing legislation had already passed, so Rep. Bell made a quick search for already introduced bills which dealt with the appropriate section of state law (sometimes abbreviated as TCA , stands for Tennessee Code Annotated). Rep. Ferguson had originally introduced a bill dealing with the section of state law governing Church-related schools (the so-called “caption” of the bill must state which section of state law will be amended). Rep. Bell and Rep. Ferguson agreed to use his bill to try to amend state law so that diplomas from church-related schools would be accepted by state agencies, regardless of whether the church-related school was accredited. To do that, they needed to take Rep. Ferguson’s original bill and “re-write” it by amending it and stripping out all of the original language and substituting the new draft that they wanted.

So, Rep. Bell and Rep. Ferguson were the co-sponsors of a bill before the House Education Committee today, and their first task was to seek to have the committee approve their amendment which re-wrote the bill to do what they wanted.

In the meantime, the department of Ed’s representative (Dr. Opie?)) had informally circulated an amendment to Rep. Bell’s bill. That amendment would have required CRS’s to only hire instructors with baccalaureate degrees. That amendment was never introduced, although Dr. Obee make some joking references to it having been circulated widely around the state. His logic was that if the state was going to have to accept a CRS Cat IV diploma, then the state should have some oversight over what was taught and who taught it. Topic for more discussion later.

So… Rep. Bell and Rep. Ferguson present their bill to the committee. Their first order of business is to request that the bill be amended with their agreed-on new language (which had been reviewed and recommended by a sub-committee). At that point, the Memphis delegation began their hour-long filibuster and proposal of an “amendment to the amendment” of the bill which would amend existing state law. Everybody still with me?

The Memphis amendment would have directed the State Department of Education to recognize those public school students who completed all their course work but failed the Gateway tests as having valid high school diplomas as well as recognizing category IV diplomas as valid if issued before July 1, 2008. Next year, of course, we’d be back in the same dilemma and fighting with the legislature all over again. The Memphis delegation tactic was to hijack this bill for their own purposes. Gateway tests have already been re-defined to count as only 25% of course grades, rather than being must-pass, but they are valiantly attempting to get high school diplomas for kids who have been unable to pass the Gateway tests in years past.

On the vote on the Memphis amendment, the Chairman (Rep. Les Winningham) originally called for a voice vote and then announced that the Memphis amendment had passed. Rep. Bell asked for a roll call vote. He can’t get one automatically, unless a Rep. on the committee asks for one. When one of the committee members asked for the roll call, the chairman directed the clerk to call the roll. Much to the embarrassment of the chairman, the roll call showed that the amendment had failed by a vote of 7-10.

So the Memphis amendment was defeated… now they were back to Rep. Bell and Rep. Fergusons’s original request to re-write the bill with their agreed-on language. That vote was also done by roll call and it passed, 9-7 with one voting present. It was immediately followed by a vote on the amended bill itself, reporting it out of committee (called “sending it to calendar and rules,” which is the committee which actually schedules bills for the full house of representatives). That vote, also by roll call was identical, 9-7 with one voting present.

Result: Representative Bell’s and Representative Ferguson’s bill came out of the Education Committee exactly the way they wanted it, written the way they wanted, without any amendment that they don’t want.

The Department of Ed amendment which would have required a baccalaureate degree for every instructor in grades 9-12 was never introduced or voted on. The Memphis amendment which would have dealt with prior year Gateway exam stopped public school students AND only recognized CRS diploma’s through July of 2008 was also defeated.

This is an important (and surprising) result. The bill which was reported out would require all state agencies to accept CRS diplomas as valid high school diplomas. Period. Regardless of whether the CRS was category II, III, or IV. This was the situation until just this year. In effect, it reverses the new policy of the department this year which began treating non-accredited CRS diplomas as invalid. It would require DHS to accept Cat IV diplomas as valid for work in a day care center, and it would require the Police accreditation commission to accept CRS diplomas as valid for those seeking to be police officers.

Next step: the bill must pass the full house of representatives AND a companion bill must pass the state senate AND then be signed by the Governor. None of these three steps is automatic or easy… though they may be easier than the mountain that had to be climbed today.

UNLESS this bill is passed, the state dept of ed will apparently continue to treat Cat IV diplomas as “worthless.” We need this bill to pass. Ironically, its not so important for homeschooled students who go on to college. Colleges and universities both in TN and nationwide have had NO problems with Cat IV diplomas. They have the ACT/SAT and other criteria to go with them. It’s the jobs that do not require a college degree but DO require a high school diploma where the problems have arisen. You don’t have to have a college degree to be a police officer – but you do have to have a high school diploma. You don’t have to have a college degree to work in a day care center – but you do have to have a high school diploma. It is in precisely those two situations where the problem has arisen. Please stay in touch with your homeschool community over the next two weeks. There is much work still to do in order to get this bill passed.

Footnote: Though the Dept spokesman today did say that they were going to internally review individual cases and would attempt to handle exceptions( like the police officer who had completed the police training academy but was then told he could no longer serve as an officer because his Cat IV high school diploma was not acceptable), I do not find that reassuring. The old homeschool law required a college degree to be able to homeschool your high school student unless you had a waiver from the Commissioner of Education. In 10+ years, despite a number of well-documented and reasonable requests, no Commissioner ever granted a waiver.

– Rob Shearer
Publisher, Greenleaf Press
Director, Schaeffer Study Center

Tennessee politics

Pre-K advocates in TN are “baffled” by GOP opposition

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They shouldn’t be, but they are. That’s the headline in today’s Tennessean – though they’re not featuring the story nearly as prominently on their website as they did on the print edition front page. Here’s the opening of the story:

From President Bush to chambers of commerce, early education has been heralded like a miracle drug that better prepares youngsters for kindergarten and beyond.

So it came as something of a surprise to Gov. Phil Bredesen and some early-education advocates — including business leaders — this year when several Tennessee Republicans, led by Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, expressed both ideological and fiscal resistance to expanding pre-kindergarten.

“These Republican lawmakers are out of step with the rest of the country,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, a Washington, D.C.-based group advocating for high-quality, voluntary pre-kindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds.

“This has been a bipartisan issue,” Doggett said. “Children are not red or blue. Early education is not about being a Democrat or Republican.”

At issue is Bredesen’s proposal to open 250 additional pre-kindergarten classrooms across the state, with an emphasis on broadening the program to middle-class children. Until now, Tennessee’s $80 million pre-kindergarten program has been geared to low-income children.

“That’s how it was sold to us,” said state Sen. Diane Black, a Gallatin Republican who is chairwoman of the Senate Republican Caucus. She supports public pre-kindergarten for poor children.

She frames her deep concerns over including middle-income tykes in the context of a culture war, finding it “very, very disturbing” for the state to think it can do a better job instructing 4-year-olds than moms or dads can.

“The message of pre-K supporters is that teachers can do a better job than parents can,” Black said. “That goes too far for me, to say that parents are not adequate.

Kudos to State Senators Ramsey and Black for standing up to this misguided attempt to expand the insatiable public education trough.

There are any number of reasons why expanding Pre-K for all children in Tennessee is a bad idea.

First, pre-K programs have NOTHING to do with long-term academic success.  Three years ago, the Tennessee Policy Institute did an excellent, detailed review of the existing research on the effectiveness of Pre-K and Head Start programs. The results might surprise you. “In the long run, cognitive and socioemotional test scores of former Head Start students do not remain superior to those of disadvantaged children who did
not attend Head Start.77″ And there’s this conclusion:

“Once the children enter school there is little difference between the scores of Head Start and control children…Findings for the individual cognitive measures—intelligence, readiness and achievement—reflect the same trends as the global measure…By the end of the second year there are no educationally meaningful differences on any of the measures.78

Finally the supposed successes of the existing program are being described this way:

“By the time 4-year-olds leave the program, they’re expected to recognize written letters and numbers, know shapes and colors, follow directions, raise their hands and finish homework.”

Friends, parents have been successfully teaching their children these things for centuries. Its part of being a parent. To imply that only children who have been enrolled in a pre-K program learn these things is insulting.

What the pre-K program REALLY is . . . is a giant jobs program for the educational unions. With declining enrollments in grades 1-12, they’re looking for ways to keep the dollars flowing and to justify the alarming number of administrative positions.

The sad, but cynical truth is this: the goal of the public education system is not to educate children but to keep the dollars flowing to the education bureaucracy and the education bureaucrats.
These objections cannot be overcome by the demagogic rhetorical trick of proclaiming that the opponents of Pre-K hate kids. Its precisely the opposite. Its because we love our children that parents don’t want to surrender them to the government-run, factory, monopoly school system.

– Rob Shearer
Director, Schaeffer Study Center
Publisher, Greenleaf Press